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I wouldn't want it done to me. Would you be okay if it was done to you?

Nope, I'd feel like crap. All I was trying to say is that I'm really not going to shift or place blame on the guy. I don't see him as the one doing me wrong in such a situation. Probably anger will make me feel different, but rational thought really leads me to that answer.

If it is part of the contract. If we want to continue with legal speak, y, cheating voids the contract immediately as far as I'm concerned. Actually. Scratch that. Lying does. Cheating is just a sort of a lie in the end.

I think it depends on the size/terms of the lie. Cheating is a big one. Some other things not so much.

I have lying as the biggest fucking character flow out there. I'm also terribly difficult to please if you break up trust once. So, instead of staying in a relationship and making it unpleasant for both of us, yeah, a lie is where I'm out.
Every lie has a reason behind it and if I can't even phantom why the fuck would you lie for something that small, I'd just get more and more paranoid.

If sleeping with someone else is so important that you might cheat, you should probably break off the relationship.

What if you can't end the relationship for reasons outside of your, and your SO's, control?

What do you mean "what if you can't end it?" Is someone holding a gun to your head?

Well, hypothetically yes. In real life it's more likely to be a financial dependency, though.

Then you're a leech. Man up and stop feigning a relationship for cash.

Or woman up.

Womyn? S/He?

Anyway seriously cheating is a sign of being incredibly clingy/needy since it shows you want something else but are too terrified of ending what you have now. People should choose one way or the other, not dick around in the middle.

I was once offered a threesome by a pair of attractive women, and turned them down because I was in a relationship at the time. My girlfriend lived hours away, had no connections to the staff, women or town, and thus was essentially the perfect crime, were I willing to undertake their offer.

I politely declined.

That said, we broke up a few weeks later for unrelated reasons, so maybe I shouldn't have been quite so blindly faithful... I keed, I keed, I'm glad I stuck by my principles.

I hail from the line of thought that everyone has a price, mine just happens to be higher than the average person will ever be willing to meet.

I think that if you really love your partner you'll turn that opportunity for cheating into an opportunity for a threesome! I mean, chick wants to do me, she's gotta do my wife too. That's how I see it anyway.

I think that if you really love your partner you'll turn that opportunity for cheating into an opportunity for a threesome! I mean, chick wants to do me, she's gotta do my wife too. That's how I see it anyway.

You can still support someone who needs supporting (if you believe they deserve it) without pretending to have a romantic relationship. (e.g. the carer for your child, a sick former partner).

Have you ever tried it?

I mean, seriously. Have you ever been involved with somebody who got sick, lost their job, and ended up financially dependent upon you at the same time you've fallen out of love with them?

Do you really think you could say "Hey I don't love you anymore but go ahead and live with me oh don't worry it'll be totally cool I'm gonna go see other people k?" and have that work?

Nope, I've never done that.

You're implying you did it. Did it work doing it the other way?

Yeah I tried it once.

Got sucked right back into the relationship within, oh, four days.

And yes I was very strongly tempted to cheat. I mean, here was this person in my house who I cared for a lot but wasn't in love with, who was sick and had nowhere to go. Meanwhile I'm falling in love with another woman. Do I kick my long-term partner out on the street with no money and no health insurance simply because I don't want to be in a relationship with her and want to be with somebody else? That's fucked up. Do I stay in a relationship with somebody who I don't love out of sympathy for their medical/financial condition while the woman I do love gets tired of waiting for me and finds another man? That's fucked up, too.

It's not an easy situation to be in and there is no right answer. Ideally, Hypothetical Sick Girlfriend goes to live with her mom or something... but when her entire family are useless fucktards and you're left holding the check (only the check is for thousands of dollars of medical bills) and you find yourself in love with another woman entirely you start questioning exactly how important it is to you to be a good person rather than a heartless bastard.

You can still support someone who needs supporting (if you believe they deserve it) without pretending to have a romantic relationship. (e.g. the carer for your child, a sick former partner).

Have you ever tried it?

I mean, seriously. Have you ever been involved with somebody who got sick, lost their job, and ended up financially dependent upon you at the same time you've fallen out of love with them?

Do you really think you could say "Hey I don't love you anymore but go ahead and live with me oh don't worry it'll be totally cool I'm gonna go see other people k?" and have that work?

Nope, I've never done that.

You're implying you did it. Did it work doing it the other way?

Yeah I tried it once.

Got sucked right back into the relationship within, oh, four days.

And yes I was very strongly tempted to cheat. I mean, here was this person in my house who I cared for a lot but wasn't in love with, who was sick and had nowhere to go. Meanwhile I'm falling in love with another woman. Do I kick my long-term partner out on the street with no money and no health insurance simply because I don't want to be in a relationship with her and want to be with somebody else? That's fucked up. Do I stay in a relationship with somebody who I don't love out of sympathy for their medical/financial condition while the woman I do love gets tired of waiting for me and finds another man? That's fucked up, too.

It's not an easy situation to be in and there is no right answer. Ideally, Hypothetical Sick Girlfriend goes to live with her mom or something... but when her entire family are useless fucktards and you're left holding the check (only the check is for thousands of dollars of medical bills) and you find yourself in love with another woman entirely you start questioning exactly how important it is to you to be a good person rather than a heartless bastard.

I wasn't saying it would be easy. I'm not saying you end up with any chance to take any moral high ground. I'm not saying you are a bad person for whatever you ended up doing.

I'm just saying it's possible to help without pretending to continue the relationship. Further, I'd say it will be a clusterfuck either way - you're quite right, there is no good answer. You end up hurting someone no matter what.

The complexities are pretty obvious to me, and I'm sure painfully obvious to you. But both paths are options.

Yeah, what made things worse is that this person identified to me as polyamorous prior to the relationship but had taken some things I'd said as hints that I wanted to be monogamous with her (I didn't, but I understand why she perceived things that way), so the poly thing was difficult to begin with. And she found this other woman incredibly threatening, so even if we had been poly, I'm sure she would have vetoed any talk of my having any romantic interactions with the other woman.

My emotional connection to that kind of dilemma is that my parents stayed together 20 years, and possibly got together, partly because they had kids to look after.

To cut a moderately fucked-up story short, that was (very very much) not a good idea. Everyone's life would have been a lot less shit if they'd stopped trying to have a relationship and done whatever finance was necessary.

You can still support someone who needs supporting (if you believe they deserve it) without pretending to have a romantic relationship. (e.g. the carer for your child, a sick former partner).

Have you ever tried it?

I mean, seriously. Have you ever been involved with somebody who got sick, lost their job, and ended up financially dependent upon you at the same time you've fallen out of love with them?

Do you really think you could say "Hey I don't love you anymore but go ahead and live with me oh don't worry it'll be totally cool I'm gonna go see other people k?" and have that work?

Nope, I've never done that.

You're implying you did it. Did it work doing it the other way?

Yeah I tried it once.

Got sucked right back into the relationship within, oh, four days.

And yes I was very strongly tempted to cheat. I mean, here was this person in my house who I cared for a lot but wasn't in love with, who was sick and had nowhere to go. Meanwhile I'm falling in love with another woman. Do I kick my long-term partner out on the street with no money and no health insurance simply because I don't want to be in a relationship with her and want to be with somebody else? That's fucked up. Do I stay in a relationship with somebody who I don't love out of sympathy for their medical/financial condition while the woman I do love gets tired of waiting for me and finds another man? That's fucked up, too.

It's not an easy situation to be in and there is no right answer. Ideally, Hypothetical Sick Girlfriend goes to live with her mom or something... but when her entire family are useless fucktards and you're left holding the check (only the check is for thousands of dollars of medical bills) and you find yourself in love with another woman entirely you start questioning exactly how important it is to you to be a good person rather than a heartless bastard.

/sigh

Yeah. I know how that one goes. And there's no good answer to any questions it brings up.

I've read a few D&D threads and Feral, I have much respect for you and your opinion.

I agree, almost all labels are really fucked up and should not be used, cheater, black, slut, gay, felon all of them. I realize labels are not always meant to be derogatory, but when they are, the people using labels need to realize that they make themselves seem extremely ignorant.
Everyone is entitled to their lifestyle, opinion, ethnicity and so on. Labeling them for past actions or who they are is the first step down discrimination road.

And regarding the OP, I think men get a bad name for the actions of a few. Also, I suspect women are quicker to end a relationship they feel isn't meeting their needs, where a man might take longer to realize or accept he should end the relationship and cheats instead. If someone is willing to cheat, I don't buy the excuse that he's giving into baser instincts, more likely he/she isn't happy in his current relationship, but hasn't ended or attempted to repair it for whatever reasons.

I am only human, and I sometimes get little pangs of jealousy, enough that I know I wouldn't work well in a polyamourous relationship and that I would never cheat on my SO. I know I would be devastated if my SO cheated on me. Humans probably aren't really meant (biologically) to be monogamous, and I respect Feral and people with polyamourous relationships. Jealousy is a flaw I have, those who aren't as jealous are really more enlightened then I.

Love and sex don't have to go together and can be very rewarding on their own.

But I feel that they're best when they are together.

I agree. Studies repeatedly show the "good" feeling from sex is mostly in your head and not from physical stimulus, so unless there is some emotional connection with your partner I would think the sex would be less "good" feeling.

The OP seems impossibly vague. Cheating has it's context, it might not be a particularly good context but just saying "she'll never know, and the other person is willing" seems well...ridiculous.

Also, the opinion doesn't seem healthy to offsetting the social repression of men's emotional contexts that we have going on here in the west.

I agree with this also, but if the OP was always perfect there would be less to debate in threads.
No one should go through their life regretting one decisions overly much, learn from it, change and move on.

By the way - cheating doesn't end your life or make you a terrible person in and of itself.

Since you used the word cheating I'm going to work off the assumption that the relationship is monogamous and that that's understood by both parties. That being the case, cheating certainly doesn't end your life, but it does mean you lack self-control. As Feral said, I don't agree with the "once a cheater, always a cheater" mentality, but I am of the school of thought that "once a cheater, respect gone."

I know there's the whole emotions thing that comes into play, but in the end I would disown a family member if I found out that cheated on their SO in a monogamous relationship.

By the way - cheating doesn't end your life or make you a terrible person in and of itself.

Since you used the word cheating I'm going to work off the assumption that the relationship is monogamous and that that's understood by both parties. That being the case, cheating certainly doesn't end your life, but it does mean you lack self-control. As Feral said, I don't agree with the "once a cheater, always a cheater" mentality, but I am of the school of thought that "once a cheater, respect gone."

I know there's the whole emotions thing that comes into play, but in the end I would disown a family member if I found out that cheated on their SO in a monogamous relationship.

That's pretty shitty of you. People tend to cheat because a need they have is not being fulfilled (not necessarily sexual).

I feel it's not their responsibility to maintain any one else's relationships. I'm not even sure it's morally valid to feel responsible for them, either.

So, you're not culpable, at all, if you knowingly go get with some married woman, who chooses whether out of being a momentary or serial fool to be with you and as a result fucks up her husband and kids with the fallout?

By the way - cheating doesn't end your life or make you a terrible person in and of itself.

Since you used the word cheating I'm going to work off the assumption that the relationship is monogamous and that that's understood by both parties. That being the case, cheating certainly doesn't end your life, but it does mean you lack self-control. As Feral said, I don't agree with the "once a cheater, always a cheater" mentality, but I am of the school of thought that "once a cheater, respect gone."

I know there's the whole emotions thing that comes into play, but in the end I would disown a family member if I found out that cheated on their SO in a monogamous relationship.

That's pretty harsh. I don't know how I feel on this. Infidelity in a monogamous relationship would really hurt my trust of a person, and I think that being able to trust another person is one of the most important things I look for in relationships (romantic or otherwise).

That said, disowning them? I don't know. It is one mistake, as large as it is.

By the way - cheating doesn't end your life or make you a terrible person in and of itself.

Since you used the word cheating I'm going to work off the assumption that the relationship is monogamous and that that's understood by both parties. That being the case, cheating certainly doesn't end your life, but it does mean you lack self-control. As Feral said, I don't agree with the "once a cheater, always a cheater" mentality, but I am of the school of thought that "once a cheater, respect gone."

I know there's the whole emotions thing that comes into play, but in the end I would disown a family member if I found out that cheated on their SO in a monogamous relationship.

By the way - cheating doesn't end your life or make you a terrible person in and of itself.

Since you used the word cheating I'm going to work off the assumption that the relationship is monogamous and that that's understood by both parties. That being the case, cheating certainly doesn't end your life, but it does mean you lack self-control. As Feral said, I don't agree with the "once a cheater, always a cheater" mentality, but I am of the school of thought that "once a cheater, respect gone."

I know there's the whole emotions thing that comes into play, but in the end I would disown a family member if I found out that cheated on their SO in a monogamous relationship.

That's pretty shitty of you. People tend to cheat because a need they have is not being fulfilled (not necessarily sexual).

What ever happen to talking to your significant other and bringing up the topic? I mean if you have some kind of dog shit eating fetish and you wish for your wife to join in, well I think you're SOL if your wife objects to it and refuse to participate. Maybe you should find someone who enjoys the same fetish?